Sunday, April 27, 2008

I recently read an intriguing new book by Amy Sutherland: What Shamu Taught Me about Life, Love and Marriage. Sutherland talks about the new generation of animal trainers, particularly trainers of exotic animals. She becomes fascinated with how the ideas which motivate these animal trainers are helpful not just to those who work with animals but to all of us as we maneuver throughout the challenges of our own relationships. Her book inspired -- at least in part -- this posting.

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Perhaps these thought are just too out of the ordinary for the therapeutic professions, and also for many who play the political game on its various levels, but in the field of animal training it seems to be becoming commonplace.

That is (I am using my own words and understandings here):

Our work is not at all one of getting rid of undesirable behaviour, thinking, attitudes, etc.

Our work is about assisting in bringing to life the person’s/animal’s natural desires and vitality into movements of relationship and ways of life which promotes the well being of all concerned.

Our work is not the work of violence which the therapeutic domain has become accustomed to – that of identifying evils which, in turn, must be torn away.

Our work is one of creation. Joint creation! Creating ways of life, being, becoming, relationship which are desirable and enhancing of the Alive within the varied relations which make up our world.

And, regarding the way we engage in this practice:

This work is not primarily a work of words, not even primarily a work of relations between the givers of words. This work is about bodies which communicate, and words are connected to bodies which communicate. The responsivity of bodies to each other within a living moment of mutual engagement is the context whereby desired goods/gifts are brought further into the realm of life.

This work is not primarily about the relationship between a practitioner/trainer and the one she/he is working with. This work is about community, it is about complexity, it is about the responses of many bodies to each other. If we have any influence at all, it is somehow within this communal realm (granted, it is possible that the communal can be awoken and influenced through one-on-one interactions).

The NaziHated allIn the poet’s wordsBut (and why do people so often forget?)He loved hygiene

Honorary Title: Master of Sanitation

Perhaps the original sin of the NaziWas a desire to produce...

(An insistence upon producing)

Cleanliness

And the second sin

A bureaucratizing of that desire

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Beyond...In another worldFar from thoseCarefully formulated(Anti-biotic)Policies and procedures

Amidst a mess and a beautyA messy beautyAmidst overgrown vinesUncut grassA littered shorelineAmidst all those un-see-able creaturesAnd (even worse)Those see-able creaturesCrawling wiggling swarmingIn the dirt beneath the feetIn the water we refuse to drink

Amidst such abundances(Such undesired excesses)We find againAnd again and againSomethingWhich is Alive

We accidentally uncoverLifeOverflowingTwitching and squirmingEvading our pills and our bleach

And in this uncoveringWe come to seeThat the AliveIs laughing(And not with us)Laughing at usAt our futile insistence

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Upon a recent trip to Portugal I was given a book by the poet, Fernando Pessoa. He is this new love! His words!

Pessoa is a most intriguing person. He wrote much of his poetry from the perspective of several other characters, he called these characters Heteronyms. Yet, within the words of each of these persons there is a feel of Pessoa also being present, never a sense of him ever being truly distinct from these various characters.

Within Portugal, and most certainly within Lisbon, Pessoa is a national treasure, a hero. Yet, his heroics are of the ordinary-people kind. In my (very new) reading of Pessoa, I never had any sense that he was directing his writing toward academia, or even toward any higher or prestigious class. Certainly an unusual poet, for his words were rarely written as his own, and, at this point in time, his words are certainly not his own, for they are now the people’s words, they are Portugal’s words.

My favourite of Pessoa’s heteronyms was named Caeiro. Pessoa himself claimed that he (Pessoa) was a disciple of Caeiro. Caeiro’s words were simple and lovely, gentle, and it could be easy to stay in this quiet place. Yet there is a power which awakens with his words, and this power quickly becomes disruptive and political. While we are not looking, Caeiro overturns tables, long standing tables, tables of religion and science, mystical tables, metaphysical tables, tables of power and control, he overturns them all, sending the golden coins and the transcendent thoughts scattering down those cobblestone streets. He was a prophet of sorts, awakening hearts, minds and bodies to something we might call “nature.” Not that nature was separate from humanity, separate from mind – not at all. For Caeiro a levelling democracy occurs, wherein the full diversity -- people, flowers, the wind, the sea, the donkey -- all is nature. However, it must be emphasized that while Caeiro used the term nature, he also disliked the word, for it was never sufficient, and all too often, through the way people used language, it became a singular and unifying thing -- and this was anathema for Caeiro.

A few of Caeiro’s words...

I believe in the World as in a daisyBecause I see it. But I don’t think about itBecause thinking is not understanding...The World was not made for us to think about(To think is to be eye-sick)But for us to look at and be in tune with...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...

If I speak of Nature, it’s not because I know what Nature is,But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,For a lover never knows what he loves,Why he loves or what love is...

As Gilles Deleuze argued for the immanent, for a world where nature is able to speak, on its terms, within its on uncountable diversity, and as Gregory Bateson turned toward what he called the grammar of the Creatura, so also Pessoa... Through Caeiro he calls forth a world where we cease to assess and calculate, we cease to encapsulate, to reduce to simple terms, and we experience life as close as possible to where it is encountered, in the way it is encountered, with a language which sees, and in turn, loves.

Nature becomes not a singularity, but many things, many possibilities which must be experienced in their own unique presentations, and not even as things enfolded under the singular umbrella of nature itself.

And also people, all those people we meet, they too are part of this nature (or this un-nature), they too are to be encountered, engaged with, experienced, discovered to be in relation with us -- and, in the end, they are to be loved. No more assessments, no more words which reduce and minimize the beautiful and even tragic complexity which we all, as people, carry with us. No more of that professional gaze which Foucault so carefully unpacked for us. But for Pessoa, for Caeiro, the motivation for this change never emerged from an abstract place of social justice, neither did it come from a commitment to environmental, cultural, gender activism... No his politics emerged from the poet’s engagement with rocks and trees, with children and oxcarts, with herds of sheep, with grass and sea and sunlight. These things of the Alive, moving upon the land and waters of Portugal... it is these things which really turn over the tables, that send our assumptions tumbling down those hilly streets. And, it seems to me, that Pessoa, through Caeiro, would have it no other way!

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Alive

This particular passage was contributed by Lynn Hoffman, who admires, as I do, the writing and philosophy of Christopher Alexander.________________

The word which we most often use to talk about the quality without a name is the word "alive."

There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, that the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death. Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive... Beethoven's last quartets are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame...

Christopher AlexanderThe Timeless Way of Building

Lynn Hoffman

Underground Communications

Now I am aware of another shift. I find that I am using a channel that has to do with sensed feelings and emotions -- not the within-person kind bequeathed to us by individual psychology, but something more like an underground communication system. Being touched or moved, sending signals, receiving images, this is the vocabulary that keeps beckoning to me now.

Lynn Hoffman

Harlene Anderson

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.Charles Darwin

At Home

And there is a distinction between finding oneself at home and trying to make oneself at home... To that extent one is not part of the ecology of what-is.

Jan Zwicky

Education and the Alive

Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little "art" so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen.Gregory BatesonFrom: Mind and Nature

Something of the Body

Bearing witness is not through and through and necessarily discursive. It is sometimes silent. It has to engage something of the body, which has no right to speak.Jacques Derrida